Antonymy and ten modern English color-names

One-hundred college-age monolingual speakers of American English were asked to indicate in writing the color that they believed to be the opposite of each of ten English color-names:white, black, red, green, blue, yellow, brown, tan, orange, andpink. The results of this experiment indicate that adult speakers of Modern English do not attribute the same degree of antonymy to all ten of these color-names.Black andwhite were clearly viewed by the subjects as having a high degree of antonymy. In fact, they were viewed as being the opposite of each other. Less antonymy was attributed to the other color-names, withorange andpink receiving the lowest scores on the Index of Relative Antonymy. Although this experiment was not designed to evaluate the Berlin and Kay (1969) hypothesis that color-names have been added to the languages of the world in accordance with an evolutionary sequence, a surprisingly high correlation (=0.94) was obtained between the relative antonymy of color-names found in this study and the evolutionary sequence of color-name acquisition postulated by Berlin and Kay. This finding suggests that the greater the antiquity of an English color-name, the greater the degree of antonymy attributed to it by adult speakers of Modern English.